Globalist Newsweek Magazine Robert J. Samuelson spins free trade

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Newsweek Samuelson spins free trade issues - The term manufacturing does not mean that products are made in the USA. The term built in American has replaced it and it should actually be called - only assembled in the USA. Cleveland Plain Dealer passes this story to its readers on the editorial page.

By Ray Tapajna - Tapsearch Com sites and blog summary Follow Ray at Twitter.com/tapsearcher

Newsweek 's Robert J. Samuelson spins free trade yarn while Value Added Tax ( VAT ) is on its way as an internal tariff on everything you buy. Free trade is trade as historically practiced and defined. The main commodities today are human beings as workers who are put on a global trading block to compete with one another for the same jobs.

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Robert J. Samuelson , columnist for Newsweek, continues to spin the news about free trade failures. Now there are proposals for a Value Added Tax ( VAT) on all products we buy with a major part of them coming from outside the USA. It is a senseless proposition to take tariffs off imports and then charge up to about 18 to 28 percent tax at retail time. This is a internal tariff no matter what you call it. It is coming because free trade has caused our economic crisis. Add the overhead of long haul shipping to the above which is a cost of about 15 to 20 percent. With a VAT tax, this adds up to 23 to 48 percent on every imported product you buy. The only way this is possible is to use workers who make less than a dollar per hour which means you pay more to live off the impoverished workers while the workers will never really be able to enjoy a living wage.

Newsweek 's Samuelson says - Global economy needs 'rebalancing'

Samuelson says the global economy needs 'rebalancing' but the geopolitical settings due to free trade are almost impossible to balance. He cites a questional success story of Caterpillar exporting more heavy equipment and hiring 600 new workers. Caterpiller had cut about 10,000 workers since 2008. Samuelson does not mention how many Caterpiller competitors have gone out of business in the U.S., nor does he mention how many of the parts are now imported. Free traders also like to tell the story about the increases in manufacturing but fail to tell how much of this manufacturing is just assembly work. The term built in America has replaced the term made in the USA. Today, ( the term should really be just assembled in the U.S.A. instead of built in America.)

Samuelson says things differently too when it comes to the American consumers. Instead of saying the new working poor class can no longer even afford the cheaper imports, he says the world needs a new engine of growth to re-place the free-spending American consumers and their ravenous appetite for other countries' exports. Up to 50 percent of American consumers are jobless or underemployed and have no money left to support the largest scam of the century being free trade and can not even afford the cheap imports.

Then Samuelson gets into all the financial and funny money games that supposedly control economic events. Our economy based on making money on money instead of making things has burned out. The global monopoly game is over. The value of workers and labor has been degraded to a point where it has impacted all the money games. The value of workers is a real money standard. The value of paper money is just a money game. Free trade is based on making human beings commodities. Workers have been put on a global block to compete with one another for the same jobs down to the lowest levels of wage slave and even child labor. There will always be workers who will work for less for the sake of survival. This is an endless loop to the bottom no matter how any nation increases their money flow. Sorting the value of money does not necessarily mean good economics.

The U.S. Federal Government sponsored the moving of factories outside the USA starting in 1956. It was supposedly a temporary program but it never ended. At first it was a slow process but then the maquiladora factory programs were initiated in Mexico and prior to the passing of the NAFTA free trade agreement, more than 2,000 U.S. factories were moved to Mexico by 1992. When NAFTA was passed, the number doubled to more than 4,000 factories. President Clinton consummated what the elder President Bush started.

Soon after that, President Clinton had to rush billions of dollars to Mexico to save the peso and the Mexican economy. The value of the peso was affecting money values in Europe. This was one of the first stimulus packages to save free trade and it went to a foreign nation- Mexico. It was a sign of the things of coming down the road but it did not stop the free traders for pushing for more of the same just as they are doing today even after free trade proving to be the major cause of our economic crisis.

All those factories moved to Mexico did not stop the tide of Mexican workers coming to American seeking economic survival. Ten Mexican bishops called NAFTA a cultural death.

Others in Central America, said the same thing about the CAFTA trade agreement. Since so many Mexican workers refused to work under the maquiladora factory conditions, many of the factories are now moving out of Mexico to places like China where workers will work for underclass wages. On top of this, the Chinese are sub contracting workers for even less in places like Jordan. It is an endles loop to the bottom. This is the nature of free trade and not when free traders like Samuelson talks about the global economy needing 'rebalancing', he is blowing in the wind. Free trade has a long history of failures while the talking heads in the media spin the real facts behind these failures. Just think, it has been more than 15 years since, NAFTA and GATT were passed. Now we live in a Bewildered New World that Manule Castells predicted many years ago. Manule Castells wrote several books about free trade and globalization and his predictions were precise. Before that, Sir James Goldsmith , author of The Trap and a major leader of the populist movement in both England and France, fought to the end trying to stop the surge of free trade. Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland and who perhaps played a larger part than President Ronale Reagan in the collapse of the Communist empire, says the U.S. has lost its way. He says, he is not an economist and knows very little about business but he does know that something is very wrong when ten percent of a our population controls 100 percent of our wealth.

Adam Smith held workers as something sacred and the core of socieity. Now workers and small businesses have no voice in the process of free trade and globalization while elite groupings control the news and lock out the real free enterprise system.